Bodrum nights
Mon, September 15, 2008 - 11:01 AM
As many people know, Bodrum's night life is notorious. I have heard more than one tour guide say:"When I am in Bodrum, I sit up by the pool bar of the hotel until 5am every night and wait until all the girls from my tour group are safely back in their hotel rooms...
Now, as I did not do anything really "bad" in Bodrum, I did go out and have fun. In day time, I would walk down to the sunny yacht harbour in the morning after breakfast and buy a ticket for a boat tour, and then spend all my day driving around on the Aegeis in dazzling sunshine, lying on the deck until I was deeply tanned, and when the boat stopped in yet another bay with blue and turquoise water, I would climb down that little ladder on the side of the boat and throw myself into the sea.
One time we stopped at "Cleopatra's mud bath". "Where is the mud??" I exclaimed, after downing a cocktail of vodka and pomegranate juice in the pier bar, and people pointed at the entrance of a cave in the rocks next to the wooden platform I was on. I lowered myself into the water, swam and crawled into the semi darkness of the grotto with some other swimmers, and there we scooped the mud and sand off the rocks and smeared each other with it laughing, until our skin was all smooth and glowing and it did do some job on your beauty, just like they said on the sign board: "Cleopatra's legendary beauty may have been due to her visiting this mud bath..."
The guys who had handed me the mud and rubbed my back with it then invited me to join them in their corner of the deck and we spent the rest of the tour lined up next to each other on the sun mats and sharing the ear phones of my i-pod. I was invited to go out together later by my ear phone-partner but declined as something else happened...
That night I went to a nice restaurant I had received directions to by my hotel manager as he was friends with the owner. I had dinner on a terrace over the sea, looking out into the dusk by candlelight. After a while I noticed an extraordinarily handsome waiter, very black hair, very black eyes, sharply curved eye brows, chiselled nose, long legs, a lean tall body, the exotic almost Arabic features of a Kurd...I kept watching him surreptitiously as I found him stunningly handsome. He must have noticed the way I looked at him, as after a while, after entertaining me like everyone else with bits of small talk, he came over again and asked me to come back in two hours when he would be finishing work. I answered his invitation with "Inshallah", which made him start with surprise, turn his head and shoot me an inquisitive look. Inshallah (Arabic for "With Allah's will") is a sure fire way of saying "maybe", a way of declining or dodging an invitation that no Moslem will argue with, and which is never answered with more questions and attempts at persuasion like any other answer might be.
However, less than two hours later I was walking down bar street again, this time to check out what else was going on there, I had not made up my mind about that invitation, and there he was, standing in the door of his restaurant to beckon people to come in. He spotted me and immediately talked me into coming inside for another drink. "Over there is a table especially reserved for you" he said, and pointed into the direction of a corner right by the sea. I was pretty sure that this is where he puts all his prospective dates and that all the other waiters knew that, too. Then he sat down and asked me whether I was alone or attached. "That is good because I am alone too", he said, and I thought to myself, that must he must be lying through his teeth, there is no way a man like that can go unattached for more than a few days... Well, I had not been completely honest myself, but thus, the game was on...
When all the guests had left, he came over, offered me another drink and started to flirt with me, in a kind of speeded up way. "Don't look at me like that", he said after a while, "You make me hot." I wondered whether this was due to me wearing my Arabic style black eyeliner belly dancer make up that he, as a Kurd, was reacting to? I stared back into his eyes and said slowly:"Your eyes are soo black..." He answered that I was embarrassing him, turned his head to the side and looked like he was almost going to blush. Haha, I still manage to make a man blush sometimes, even this wild looking exotic Kurd, I thought...Maybe he was not used to women flirting back in that way? Or felt caught in this whole staged scenario? Whatever, when he asked me to go out with him, I told him, that the owner of my hotel knew the owner of his restaurant, that the staff in my hotel had been carefully observing me all these days and I did not want people to start talking about me as I knew what they were thinking and did not like it. So, when we were ready to go, he said:"If you are worried about what people think, just follow me..." He instructed me to leave the restaurant before him, walk down the street for a while and wait there... I did, stopped at some store 200m down the street to buy cigarettes , and 5 minutes later, suddenly there he was. He told me to follow him quietly, and walked ahead, with me trailing about 3-5 meters behind, and thus, we walked off into the darkness to where noone could find us...; )
When I told this story to Özlem, the painter in Galatasaray on my way back in Istanbul, she laughed and said:"You were acting just like a Turkish girl!" "Why, is that how they do it?" "Yes", she said, "that is exactly the way they do it." ; )
